Wales

As many as one in eight people in Wales are finding it a 'constant struggle' to keep up with their bills, according to the latest findings from the National Survey of Wales.

The National Survey collects detailed information on the views and experiences of people across Wales on a wide range of topics, involving face-to-face interviews with around 14,500 people a year. The latest report, for 2012-13, focuses on the issue of financial inclusion.

Schemes to reduce poverty among particular ethnic groups in Wales need to form part of population-wide anti-poverty strategies, a new study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has concluded.

The qualitative study focused on the experiences of people from five ethnic groups – Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Polish, Somali and white British/Welsh – living in a range of different areas including a large city, the north Wales coast, the south Wales valleys and the countryside. The 47 respondents were all experiencing relatively high levels of poverty.

As many as 690,000 people in Wales (23 per cent of the total) were estimated to be living in low-income households over the three year period to 2011-12, according to a regular monitoring report published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The Welsh Government has claimed it is doing more than the UK coalition government – or any of the other devolved administrations – by way of efforts to tackle poverty. The claim was made by the Deputy Minister for Tackling Poverty, Vaughan Gething, as the Welsh Government submitted evidence to the UK Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

New 'anti-poverty champions' are being planned in Wales to help the poorest groups in society and protect those most at risk of poverty and social exclusion. The Welsh Government is asking each of the 22 local councils in Wales to create two champions, one of them an elected councillor and the other a senior council official.

The Minister for Communities and Tackling Poverty, Huw Lewis, said the champions will be an integral part of the Welsh Government's response to poverty – against a background of economic recession and benefit changes that will hit the most vulnerable groups hardest.

People in Wales will suffer annual benefit cuts totalling at least £590 million by 2014-15, according to a study commissioned by the Welsh Government. Families with children will lose out the most, the analysis concludes, along with those on low-to-middle incomes.

Around 200,000 children are living in poverty in Wales, or one in three of the total, according to a new report from the Save the Children charity. In addition, as many as 90,000 live in severe poverty. On both counts, Wales has the highest rate of child poverty of any nation in the UK.

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PSE:UK is a major collaboration between the University of Bristol, Heriot-Watt University, The Open University, Queen's University Belfast, University of Glasgow and the University of York working with the National Centre for Social Research and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. ESRC Grant RES-060-25-0052.